


cooking by the book remix ft. lil jon

by hotknife666 (hotdammneron)



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: M/M, bon appetit test kitchen, cooking in a very vague sense of the word
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-08
Updated: 2019-08-08
Packaged: 2020-08-11 23:09:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20161648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotdammneron/pseuds/hotknife666
Summary: Getting expedited grocery delivery on dry pasta is like thirty dollars, but holding grudges until you die is free.





	cooking by the book remix ft. lil jon

**Author's Note:**

> this is for aisling. happy birthday u southern freak. sorry i accidentally compared nolan patrick to a horse twice, but i'm not sorry at all.

Nolan Patrick isn’t by any means “good” at “cooking”. He’s pretty sure his mom tried to teach him how to make macaroni or some shit when he was ten, but he was too busy thinking about fixing his crossovers to absorb anything she said. 

That being said, what he lacks in cooking skill, he makes up for in being a dumb bitter bitch, and like, stubbornness. Quality character traits.

It all starts - okay, technically it all starts at training camp in 2017, when he was just a nervous one trick show pony of a lad with a shitty haircut and blushy cheeks wondering when Nico Hischier was gonna text him back - and he didn’t text back, just for the record. 

Technically speaking, it all started when he accidentally zoned out watching Teeks unlacing his skates after practice, and thought a little too long about sticking those hands in his mouth. It’s all semantics. 

But like, addressing the current situation at hand, rather than just the general Teeks Situation that Patty’s been hornily entangled in for two years now, it all starts when they come home late. Trav’s insisting on crashing at Patty’s place, like always, because he’s a fuckin’ freeloader, and then he’s borrowing some of Patty’s basketball shorts, and then he’s making him watch a youtube video.

It’s a youtube video of a guy making sauerkraut, and Pats might be spiralling about it. 

(There’s not really any questioning it, for anything more than performative obstinate denial. He’s spiralling.)

“Dude, why don’t you have fuckin’ youtube on your TV?” Teeks yells from the living room. “Like, it’s free, ‘s not like netflix, you don’t have to pay to install it!”

“Because I don’t need to have youtube on my TV, moron,” Pats says, at a normal volume, because the whole Open Floor Plan thing means nobody has to yell across the house, but he doesn’t expect Trav to understand or respect that. 

Trav, as it stands, is slumped across the entirety of the couch, and looking dejected. “But I was gonna show you a video,” he says, and Pats isn’t fully sure what ‘dejected’ means, but he thinks it fits. 

“Can’t you just show me on your phone? Or, like, my laptop’s in the other room, whatever,” Nolan says, coming back around to kinda glower at Travis. Something about looming. Taking advantage of being tall as balls with a shortass best friend to make a point. 

“You could just get youtube on your TV,” Trav mumbles, sort of glaring up through his eyelashes at Pats where he’s looming. It’s kinda cute, even if he’s pouting because he’s a big fuckin’ baby.

“Why are you such a baby, I can’t stand you,” Nolan says, and lunges to try and smother him with a pillow. 

TK texts him about dinner (read: a string of various and sundry food emojis, including four knives in a row and three eggplants, as ominously as that can be interpreted, followed by two dozen question marks) right while Nolan’s trying some, like, experimental shit. 

So, they have two days off, sure, and he was hungry as fuck when he got back from the gym, so he ate some of the frozen shit from his meal service, but then it was like. Not the best food, obviously, it’s frozen and protein packed shit, and a shame-search of Pinterest for “easy recipes” took, like. Two seconds tops. 

(In a moment of extreme willpower, Nolan very pointedly does not go to any of the recipes that the sauerkraut dude is associated with, which means he has to click away from like two different websites just for saying ‘bon appetit’ anywhere in the article. Getting expedited grocery delivery on dry pasta is like thirty dollars, but holding grudges until you die is free.)

Nolan’s phone buzzes on the counter, and he’s leaned halfway across the countertop to triple check how much thyme goes in this sauce. He just found out what thyme is, and his phone keeps buzzing, because Teeks is a needy bitch who can’t go to Taco Bell alone without having a breakdown. 

“Dude, just come downstairs, we can get dinner in a bit,” Nolan says into the voice to text thing on his phone, scrambling to turn his ringer off without knocking the knife onto his own foot. The headlines wouldn’t be pretty if he got stabbed the first time he ever tried to cook something other than kraft easy mac. 

When Trav unlocks Nolan’s front door a few minutes later, he doesn’t say anything weird about him cooking, doesn’t chirp him within an inch of his life or anything of the sort. He just settles into the living room like he lives there, since he basically does, puts his feet on the coffee table and uses the charger by the couch Nolan never uses. 

It’s not weird when they eat, even when Travis ribs him a little for being scared to season shit (like he has any room to talk). It’s not even weird when Travis offers to take care of the dishes, and he falls asleep on the couch. 

It’s like - okay, Nolan prides himself in not making things weird. Like, he didn’t make things weird when he got a boner the last time Tanner brushed a hand over the back of his neck cutting his hair in the basement. He hasn’t made things weird with his TK situation, and he isn’t planning on making it weird any time soon. 

The fact of the matter is, teaching yourself how to cook to prove a point to your bro that he doesn’t seem to notice you’re trying to prove? That’s not fucking weird. That’s some notoriously chill self-betterment shit, and it comes with a bonus of pretty good food. 

So, no, Nolan’s not making it weird.

_ Bro whats’ 4 dinner,_ TK texts from literally the other end of the team bus, like he couldn’t just get up and walk down the aisle to be a pain in the fucking ass.

_ Freeloader,_ Nolan texts back, and he turns off his phone to try and sleep through the drive.

They get takeout on the way home, because Nolan’s still trying to prove a point here, and because he didn’t get any groceries before the trip, so his kitchen is fuckin’ barren. Not that he’d, like, be cooking just because Teeks asked him to. That’s not what’s going on here. 

“You’d make a fuckin’ terrific boyfriend, y’know that, right?” Travis says when they’re back in Nolan’s apartment, his second beer held too loosely between his fingers. Nolan’s gonna kill him if it spills on the rug. He snorts a little at the comment, like a weird nervous horse laughing at a bad joke. The metaphor is lost as soon as he thinks of it.

“Whatever, I’d be a better boyfriend than you,” he says a few seconds too late to sound normal, and punches TK in the thigh to not think about how alright of a boyfriend he’d actually be. 

As much as he’d hate to admit it to anyone, Nolan did watch, like, a few of the videos of his own free will. He wonders if he’d have any deniability if Trav saw his youtube history, but there’s enough weird shit in there he’d get distracted within seconds of starting his lecture about being a hypocrite. 

He doesn’t really get the appeal of the dude from Jersey, with the hat, the one Teeks has a big ol’ boner for all the time. Sometimes there’s a girl in the videos who’s got pretty cool hair, and she’s all responsible and shit, but she laughs at hat dude’s jokes, and they get along, even if they don’t seem like they would.

Whatever, there was a night where TK was out with Crouser while they played the Yotes, and Nolan made himself a self pitying hotel blanket nest and watched some videos of them making bread, and he maybe got the appeal, like, a little bit. 

It’s something about the dynamic, maybe, but it’s hard to place what it reminds him of. He’s a little too sleepy to stop the next video from auto-playing. 

“Hey, come over later?” Travis says, whipping Nolan’s half unlaced skate with one of those stupid gatorade branded towels. Nolan, for a brief moment of morning-skate induced mania, wants to kill him with his bare hands. Or, like, kiss the soft inside of his wrist, just past where his jersey sleeve is pushed up. 

“I’ll see if I can handle the commute,” he says with the last selvages of his Press Monotone, because being a snarky bitch is the only thing ever keeping him from being a complete idiot. 

“I’ll see you at like, seven, then,” Travis says, and he seems a little more fidgety than usual, a touch more frantic on top of his usual vibes. Maybe Nolan’s projecting. 

Across the room, Carter shoots him a bizarrely withering look, because he thinks he knows things. Nolan figures another few months in Philly and he’ll forget most of that. 

Nolan takes a nap when he gets home, after a weirdly frigid hug with TK when they part ways at the elevator, because he doesn’t really want to think about that any more than necessary. He makes a weird snack from leftovers when he wakes up, changes into jeans and a nice-ish flannel in case Trav’s stupid mystery plans include going out. 

He’s fucking around on insta when Travis texts him, says he can come over earlier if he wants, and so he does. 

When Travis opens the door (on the first knock, like he’d been waiting), the first thing Nolan notices is the food smell coming from the apartment. The second thing he notices is that Trav is wearing a goddamn tie, in the safety and comfort of his own home, like he doesn’t usually take his whole shirt off whenever he enters anyone’s home. 

“You look nice,” Nolan says, because his impulse control said fuck it and left halfway up the stairs, and Travis tugs him in by the arm. 

“Thanks, you too,” Teeks says, in a rush to let go of Nolan’s arm and half-power walk through the apartment to the conspicuously mailless dining table. “You can - here, have a seat,”

“Dude, has anyone sat at this table since you bought it?” Nolan asks, because when he was here a week ago the tabletop was crowded with junk mail and a single sock, and this whole thing seems, like, kinda fuckin’ shady. 

“Shut up,” Teeks says from the kitchen, and when he comes back, he’s got fucking potholders on his hands, and that’s new. He’s sort of darting around the table, getting things in place, and he burns his fingertip trying to light a match for a candle with hardly any wick left, and Nolan wants to - do something, anything to make him slow down a little bit. Just to make him chill. 

“What’s this about?” Nolan asks carefully once Trav seems more settled, sitting in the chair across from him and very obviously avoiding eye contact. 

“I just figured,” he starts, running his fingers along the rim of his empty wine glass. “Like, you can’t be the only one who gets to do the whole, y’know.” 

Nolan does not, in fact, know.

“You kept making dinner for me, is all, and I figured you can’t be the only one who gets to do this whole grand romantic gestures with food thing, right?” Travis continues, getting a little bit mumbly at the end, but undeniably throwing the word ‘romantic’ in like it’s nothing. Nolan’s heart might skip a beat. 

“I taught myself how to cook for you, Teeks,” Nolan says, reaching out across the weirdly crowded table to get his hand - close to Trav’s, not touching, whatever.

“I know, dude,” Trav says, finally looking up, and jesus christ, Nolan is so fuckin’ gone on him. 

“I can’t believe you -” Nolan says, cutting himself off a little and trying to cope. “I watched cooking videos for you. I watched the fuckin’ youtube cooking videos you love, in Arizona last month, because you were gone for the night and I missed you so much, how fucked up is that?” 

“That’s pretty fucked up,” Travis says and he laughs a little bit. “It’d be pretty fucked up if you kissed me right now, bro, I dare you to do it,”

Nolan nearly knocks his chair over trying to get around the table, but it’d be worth it. 

“Dude, the pasta’s gonna get cold,” Travis says, and Nolan’s a little worried about the structural integrity of Trav’s dining table chairs standing up to both of them mostly sitting on it, but he’s got other stuff on his mind. 

(The pasta does, in fact, get cold. It’s gross reheated. They go out to dinner instead.)

**Author's Note:**

> in the grand scheme of the ba test kitchen nhl crossover universe of my dreams somehow claude giroux ends up on back to back chef. my twitter is blghorny


End file.
